Off the panchayat roll, heard on a Sunday, refused: Rajasthan HC will not reopen a voter list mid-election
Justice Nupur Bhati sat on a holiday to hear a Balotra couple whose names were deleted from a gram panchayat electoral roll, and held that once the election programme of 3 October was out, a direction to restore them would disturb the process in a way Article 243-O is meant to prevent.
The Rajasthan High Court opened on a Sunday to decide whether two villagers in Balotra district could get back on to the voter list of their gram panchayat before the public notice for the election went out the next morning. By 10.20 that night it had an answer. Justice Nupur Bhati, sitting singly at Jodhpur with the Chief Justice's permission to hear the matter on a holiday, dismissed the petition. The election programme had been published on 3 October 2026, and any order to add names to the roll at this stage, she held, would force the election authorities to alter it after the process had begun.
Two names, one objection, and nine months of orders
Manoj Kumar Godara, 31, and his wife Kiran Choudhary, 28, say they ordinarily live at Gram Vadel Nadi, a revenue village constituted separately by a notification of 26 December 2019 and brought within Gram Panchayat Motinagar, in Panchayat Samiti Sindhari, by a notification of 21 November 2025. Godara bought 0.6472 hectare out of Khasra No. 151 there by a registered sale deed of 13 December 2024. When the draft panchayat electoral roll for Ward No. 2 of Motinagar was published on 29 January 2026, the couple were on it at Serial Nos. 130 and 131.
A man named Chimaram objected that they were not ordinarily resident in the ward. On 20 February 2026 the Electoral Registration Officer (Panchayat), who is the Sub-Divisional Magistrate at Sindhari, ordered their names deleted. The couple appealed to the District Collector, Balotra. While that appeal was pending they came to the High Court once already, and on 16 April 2026, in S.B. Civil Writ Petition No. 7941 of 2026, the court directed the Collector to decide quickly and to keep in mind the concept of ordinary residence under Section 20 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
On 18 May 2026 the Collector partly allowed the appeal, set aside the deletion order and sent the matter back to the ERO for a fresh decision after hearing both sides and examining the documents and inquiry material. Both sides appeared before the ERO on 24 August 2026 and filed their responses. No decision came, and the couple filed further applications pressing for one. On 3 October 2026 the State Election Commission announced the Panchayati Raj election programme by press note.
Four days later, on 7 October, the ERO ordered a fresh local inquiry. The Halka Patwari asked that it be done through a committee because the matter was sensitive. An inquiry report nonetheless came in the next day, 8 October. It said the couple's residential dhani was not found in Khasra No. 151 and placed their residence instead in Khasra No. 150/103 of Revenue Village Sindhari Chousira. It also recorded geographical coordinates which, the couple say, differed materially from the location material they had relied on.
On 9 October the High Court, in a second writ petition, S.B. Civil Writ Petition No. 24908 of 2026, directed the ERO to decide the matter preferably within two days of receiving a certified copy, keeping the statutory concept of ordinary residence in view. The ERO passed his order the same day, rejecting the claim substantially on the strength of the 8 October inquiry report. The couple filed Revenue Appeal No. 09 of 2026 before the Collector on 13 October, relying among other things on photographs dated 14 October and geo-location material. The Collector dismissed it on 15 October. The writ petition, filed on 17 October, asked that both orders be quashed and the names restored at Serial Nos. 130 and 131, or alternatively that the claim be reconsidered after a proper hearing within a fixed short period.
What was argued on the Sunday
Mr Mrigraj Singh Rathore, with Mr Kunal Upadhyay, appeared for the couple. For the respondents, Mr Monal Chugh appeared through video conference for Mr Rajesh Panwar, Senior Advocate and Additional Advocate General, and Mr Ravindra Jala appeared for Mr S.S. Ladrecha, AAG. The State's lawyers wanted time to file a reply, but with the Rule 58 public notification due the following day, 19 October, they agreed to argue without one.
The petitioners' case had four limbs. First, the names were deleted on the basis of an inquiry report prepared in their absence; they were neither associated with the inquiry nor given a chance to place facts and documents before whoever conducted it. Second, the Collector had applied the wrong legal test. Section 18(2) of the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj Act, 1994 speaks of a person who is ordinarily resident, not a permanent resident, yet the appeal had been rejected on the ground that the couple were not permanent residents of the constituency. Third, the petition was maintainable under Rule 21A of the Rajasthan Panchayati Raj (Election) Rules, 1994. That rule bars any amendment, transposition or deletion of an entry, and any direction for inclusion under Rules 20 and 21, after the public notice under Rule 23 or Rule 58 is issued and until the election is over. The Rule 58 notice had not yet gone out, so the bar had not kicked in. Fourth, there was no delay: appeal rejected on 15 October, certified copy on 16 October, petition on 17 October.
On the constitutional point, counsel relied on Sampat Singh v. Election Commission, Rajasthan, a batch of writ petitions decided in 2010 (S.B. Civil Writ Petition Nos. 851-852, 874, 883 and 994 of 2010), where the court had said that Article 243-O does not bar judicial review under Article 226.
The State answered that the petition was not maintainable at all. The election programme had been issued on 3 October 2026, so the bar under Article 243-O had come into operation; any interference now would obstruct and delay the process, because including the couple would require a revised electoral roll to be prepared and published. The right to vote is statutory, not fundamental, so the couple could not claim an indefeasible right to relief under Article 226 once the process had started. Counsel relied on the division bench order of 15 October 2026 in Kanti Lal v. State of Rajasthan (D.B. Special Appeal Writ No. 1237 of 2026), which had applied the Supreme Court's decisions in Election Commission of India v. Ashok Kumar, Lakshmi Charan Sen v. A.K.M. Hassan Uzzaman and Anugrah Narain Singh v. State of U.P. and refused a stay that would hinder the election.
On the merits, the State said the couple did not meet the ordinary residence requirement in Section 18 of the 1994 Act. Explanation (ii) to that provision says a person is not to be deemed ordinarily resident in a ward merely because he owns or possesses a dwelling house there. The couple's case rested on the purchase of land in the constituency, which by itself was not enough. The State also said the procedure under Rule 14 of the Election Rules had been followed: notice was served and a hearing given before the impugned order.
Why Sampat Singh did not help
The judge framed the first question as whether any indulgence could be granted after the election programme was published on 3 October. Article 243-O, she said, exists to make sure the electoral process is not interrupted by judicial proceedings, to secure the timely completion of elections and to channel election disputes into the remedies prescribed by law. Once the programme is notified the court must “exercise its extraordinary jurisdiction with due circumspection” and ask whether the relief sought would interfere with, impede or delay the process.
She then distinguished Sampat Singh on its facts. In that case the grievance was that no notice had been issued and no hearing given before the names were deleted. The extract she reproduced from the 2010 judgment shows the court there had found no evidence behind the objections, a perfunctory non-speaking order, and no notice served, in defiance of Rule 20(1). Here, by contrast, the record showed that after the complaint was filed the authority issued a notice dated 17 August 2026 to the couple and gave them a hearing before deciding their claim. The two cases were therefore materially different.
The judgment then set out, at length, four recent decisions of the same court that had refused to intervene once an election programme was out. In Babu Singh v. State of Rajasthan (S.B. Civil Writ Petition No. 24123 of 2026, decided 9 October 2026), a challenge to the allotment of a seat for the ensuing panchayat election had been dismissed as not maintainable at that stage. That judgment, which Justice Bhati quoted in extenso, traced the principle to the Constitution Bench in N.P. Ponnuswami v. Returning Officer, Namakkal Constituency on the meaning of the word election, and reasoned that the applicability of the bar must be judged by the nature of the challenge and the relief sought rather than merely by the date on which the petition is heard. The division bench in Kanti Lal, hearing the appeal from Babu Singh, recorded on 15 October that the election programme for gram panchayats across the State had been published on 3 October, that the process was to conclude by 17 November 2026, and that the court would not interfere so as to hinder it. It refused interim relief but admitted the appeal on the maintainability question. The bench also recorded that the State had undertaken before the Supreme Court to finish the elections by 15 April 2026, a deadline later extended to 15 November 2026.
Two more coordinate bench decisions concerned voters, not seats. In Kuldeep Kumar v. State of Rajasthan (S.B. Civil Writ Petition No. 17875 of 2026) the petitioner's name had been dropped from a revised municipal electoral roll without a hearing; the court declined relief because the municipal election programme had already been notified, holding that the bar under Article 243-ZG comes into operation automatically once the programme is declared. In Satyanarayan v. State Election Commission (S.B. Civil Writ Petition No. 17867 of 2026, decided 3 September 2026) the grievance was again deletion from the roll, and the court again declined to interfere, citing Ponnuswami and paragraph 29 of Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner on the distinction between proceedings that interfere with the progress of an election and those that further it.
The stage of the case decides it
Drawing these together, Justice Bhati held that the stage at which the petition was filed was a material consideration in deciding whether relief could be granted. The programme was published on 3 October. Any direction to include the couple's names now would require consequential action by the election authorities and might require alteration of the roll after publication of the programme. Such an intervention could affect the later stages of the election and, on the facts of this case, would be inconsistent with the principle of judicial restraint that governs interference in an ongoing electoral process.
She did not go as far as the State had asked. The court, she said, was conscious that the jurisdiction under Article 226 “cannot be construed as having been altogether extinguished” in every election matter merely because a programme has been published. But its exercise must be guided by the constitutional limits on electoral disputes, the stage the process has reached, and the effect the relief would have on its uninterrupted completion. On those considerations, and on the authorities she had set out, she did not find it appropriate to grant the relief sought at this stage.
The judgment does not decide whether the Collector was right to speak of permanent residence, whether the 8 October inquiry should have been conducted by a committee, or where the couple's dhani actually stands. Those questions were left where the election authorities had left them.
Order
The writ petition was dismissed with no order as to costs, and pending applications were disposed of. The petition was reserved at 1 p.m. on Sunday, 18 October 2026 and pronounced at 10.20 p.m. the same day. The orders of the Electoral Registration Officer dated 9 October 2026 and the District Collector, Balotra dated 15 October 2026 stand, and the names of Manoj Kumar Godara and Kiran Choudhary remain off the Ward No. 2 roll of Gram Panchayat Motinagar for this election. The order is marked reportable.